An Uber driver charged with discrimination against a lesbian couple has been cleared by a New York judge, and may soon be back on the road.

In June, Emma Pichl, 24, and her girlfriend, 26-year-old Alex Iovine, left a bar in Gowanus, Brooklyn and hailed an Uber. The couple of two years got in the back of Ahmad El Boutary’s car and took off for the East Village. Shortly after crossing a bridge into Manhattan, Pichl told the New York Post that the couple “leaned over and pecked kiss, very fast.” The driver told them not to kiss in his car — and the video Iovine shot of the confrontation that followed went viral.

The couple filed a complaint, and not only was El Boutary removed from the Uber app, his Taxi and Limousine Commission license was also suspended.

But at a hearing Monday at New York’s Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings, a judge recommended that El Boutary get his license back, and said there wasn’t enough evidence to show that the driver was engaging in discrimination based on the lesbian couple’s sexual orientation.

According to the ruling, shared with them. by El Boutary’s attorney Daniel Ackman, the driver testified that he has driven for Uber for four years and has picked up “all kinds of people,” including same-sex couples. El Boutary told the court that he has “no problem at all with, with kissing. I like to kiss. I’m a human being. The thing is, these girls...they went over and over, kissing. Deeply kissing, the touching… [it’s] a car service, not a car for sex. They were about, they were about to [have] sex in the car.”

El Boutary said he asked the couple to stop making out and they ignored him. He told the court he’d never kicked anyone out of his car before, and only stopped and asked them to leave after their behavior “exceeded the limitations.”

Both the couple and the driver filed separate complaints with Uber; El Boutary’s said a drunken couple had behaved inappropriately in his car and later “slapped the door” and spit in the car, and the couple’s denied any inappropriate behavior while charging the driver with anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination.

“Uber does not tolerate any form of discrimination, and we have been in touch with the rider regarding her experience,” says a spokesperson for Uber. “We have removed the driver's access to the app.”

The spokesperson did not provide further comment when asked if El Boutary would be allowed back on the Uber app, but pointed back to the statement above.

Uber has a policy against sexual activity in its cars, and also has a strong anti-discrimination policy that prohibits drivers from refusing service to a passenger based on “race, religion, national origin, disability, sexual orientation, sex, marital status, gender identity, age or any other characteristic protected under applicable federal or state law.”

But Uber’s record is hardly clean. The car-sharing company has come under fire in the past for contracting with drivers who sexually harassed or assaulted passengers; one CNN investigation this April found records spanning the past four years showing 103 Uber drivers who had raped or sexually assaulted passengers. The company’s internal atmosphere is also notorious: after former Uber engineer Susan Fowler blew the whistle on her own sexual harassment experience, an internal investigation found an epidemic of hundreds of workplace sexual harassment cases that had been ignored by management — 20 employees were fired in the aftermath. The most recent employee sexual harassment lawsuit against the company was filed just this May, when former engineer Ingrid Avendaño alleged not only years of harassment, but retaliation from the company when she tried to report it. There’s also a class-action lawsuit, with over 400 members accusing the company of similarly ignoring their own sexual harassment claims.

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Apart from the apparently rampant culture of extreme sexual harassment at Uber offices, there have also been some very questionable decisions about marketing. In France, Uber ran a 2014 campaign that offered to pair male passengers with “hot chick” drivers. Videos advertising the promotion zoomed in on the female drivers’ body parts, and ad copy included such gems as “who said women don’t know how to drive?” The company was criticized for basically inviting male passengers to sexually harass and objectify women who drive for the company.

It’s not even the first time a gay couple says they were kicked out of an Uber for kissing. In December 2017, Randall Magill and his fiancé Jose Chavez grabbed an Uber home after a holiday party. Magill told Houston’s KPRC that the couple rode in separated seats in the back of a minivan, and leaned over once to quickly kiss in the aisle — at which point the driver allegedly pulled off the freeway into a deserted area and told them to get out of the car.

Regardless of the company’s shady history, Administrative Law Judge Joycelyn McGeachy-Kuls ruled in favor of the driver in the case initiated by the lesbian couple. In her verdict, McGeachy-Kuls wrote that Pichl and Iovine had changed their account of what happened during the investigation, whereas El Boutary’s remained consistent. She also found him more believable, writing that it was unlikely he would have kicked the couple out of the car were they simply sharing “one peck kiss” as they claimed. Ultimately, the judge ruled in favor of the driver, she wrote, because “the complainants and respondent all testified that respondent did not make any reference to their sexual orientation during their encounter.”

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